My highlighted passages from The Psychology of Money by @morganhousel. Thread below

1. The 401k - the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement - did not exist until 1978. The Roth Ira was not born until 1998. If it were a person it would be barely old enough to drink

2. NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success - both your own and others': "Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems."
3. Margin of safety - you can call it room for error or redundancy
4. "Every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd."
5. "The average equity fund investor underperformed the funds they invested in by half a percent per year, according to Morningstar - the result of buying and selling when they should have just bought and held."
6. "The implosion of the dot-com bubble in the really 2000s reduced household wealth by $6.2 trillion. The end of the housing bubble cut away more than $8 trillion. It's hard to overstate how socially devastating financial bubbles can be. They ruin lives."
7. (Perhaps my favorite) "The formation of bubbles isn't so much about people irrationally participating in long term investing. They're about people somewhat rationally moving toward short-term trading to capture momentum that had been feeding on itself."
8. "Pessimism just sounds smarter and more plausible than optimism. Tell someone that everything will be great and they're likely to either shrug you off or offer a skeptical eye. Tell someone they're in danger and you have their undivided attention."
9. "Only 2.5% of Americans owned stocks on the eve of the great crash of 1929 that sparked the Great Depression."
10. "Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore. There are lots of overnight tragedies. There are rarely overnight miracles."
11. "Growth is driven by compounding which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant."
12. "Expecting things to be bad is the best way to be pleasantly surprised when they're not. Which, ironically, is something to be optimistic about."
13. "It can't be overstated: there is no greater force in finance than room for error, and the higher the stakes, the wider it should be."
14. "Time is the most powerful force in investing."

More from Life

1/“What would need to be true for you to….X”

Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?

A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:


2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to

- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal

3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:

Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.

Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.

4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?

To get clarity.

You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.

It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.

5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”

Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.

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I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991."
https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.